M.her grandmother was called Emma and she was the beauty of the village. She was born in 1901 in Cusio, in Casale Corte Cerro, a too long name for a town of few souls, but destined for its position and for the vagaries of history to be crucial during the Resistance. The beauty of the country, dark and with large velvet eyes, fell in love with the beauty of the country, Pietrotall, blond and with blue eyes (characteristics that will be very useful to him later to successfully disguise himself as a perfect German soldier).
Partisans during the liberation of Milan (photo Getty Images).
They will have three children born in the 1920s, before the war, world and civil, upsets their liveslike everyone’s, and catapult their quiet village into a nightmare. Pietro and the boys go to the mountains and become partisans. Emma will do the relayand willingly, because this also meant maintaining contact with loved ones and bringing them what to survive. But one bad day someone says one word too many and she is taken by the fascists.
A parenthesis to forget
The grandmother did not tell anyone what they did to her in those weeks before they released her. It was a parenthesis she preferred to forget, with the shy modesty of her generation. A couple of cruel details were heard from some villager who gravitated around her place of detention and from the first of her who pulled her out of that hell.
What is certain is that she never revealed where her children and her husband were and when someone asked her where she had found the courage to keep her mouth shut even when the black shirts had slammed her against the wall screaming that they would have shot her instantly if she didn’t speak, she spread her arms with a shy half smile, as if to say: «And what else could I do?».
It had been natural, like fetching water from the pump every day or knead in San Giorgio those special shortbread biscuits of his country called figascinä, a name that made the Milanese blush but which was only the dialect corruption of the word “focaccina”.
He saw nothing exceptional in his behavior: you had to do it just like that. He had to fight. He had to know how to be silent. “We women,” she said in her calm way, “are no less.” Point. The name of Emma Mordini appears, with the qualification of “fighter” of the Alpine division Filippo Beltrami, in the files of the Historical Institute of the Resistance of Novara.
“La Resistenza taciuta” by Massimo Canuti, on newsstands on September 3 with the “Corriere della Sera” and “iO Donna”, at 6.90 euros plus the price of the newspaper and the weekly.
Chutzpah to distract the Germans
The story of my grandmother Emma immediately came to mind when I picked up Massimo Canuti’s dense book The Silent Resistancewhich tells of the contribution to our civil war of many women like her, or very different from her. The range of the protagonists is in fact very wide: mothers of families as was the grandmother, workers, office workers, students, intellectuals, peasants, teachers, Red Cross women.
Each making available what they hada barn where to shelter the wanted, weapons to carry, to hide or to hold, food, medicines, a house where to meet in secret, a bicycle to make the relay, a lot of cheek to distract the German soldiers, maybe even a pen and a voice like Anna Garofalothe journalist who in 1944 conceived a radio show, Words of womeninviting everyone to tell each other.
“The fear was that, with the return of peace, this rumor that had proved so important during the conflict would be silenced,” the book explains. Because this has always happened, even in the past: like spring toys, women were pulled out of the box of preconceived roles only in an emergency.
Then they could work in the ward, drive trams, work shifts in the factory and all those things that in normal times only men were allowed. But once the emergency was over, we had to go back to the box and stay there. And don’t rely too much on your work by demanding medals and awards like male fighters. The historical difference was that this time the women in that box would not return to it at all.
The same rights, including voting
“After the end of the war there was a kind of general silence on female resistance as an attempt was made to normalize the role of women, who during the war had experienced a de facto emancipation from traditional roles” says Canuti. “The goal that Garofalo set herself, and with her the entire female world, was to obtain universal suffrage“.
Striking, isn’t it? Our partisan grandmothers who also carried the machine gun when necessary were in fact suffragettes. It almost makes you smile the anachronism of the image and the word: it was no longer the nineteenth century, it was the mid-twentieth century.
Canuti’s women
But all the women told in Canuti’s book, for example Irma Flagnomen omen, Gappist martyr, “first among Bolognese women to take up arms” or the mondina Gina Borellini“Tireless relay and valiant fighter” or Livia Bianchia young Venetian widow who entrusted her child to her parents in order to fight and was “captured with her companions and sentenced to be shot” or Tina Lorenzonidaughter of professors and “intelligent informant” to save the Jews.
It’s still Modesta Rossia farmer and mother of five children who “followed her husband in the rugged mountains of the Apennines” or Tuscany Norma Pratelli Parenti“Young wife and mother who provided hospitality to fugitives” or Cecilia Deganutti “Valiant Red Cross nurse” who cared for the wounded in hiding and all the others, had earned in the field the right to die like men and be buried at best under the shade of the beautiful flower of Hello beautifulbut not to live on an equal footing with them, with the same rights, including the right to vote.
It would come later, the vote for women, laboriously, when the war was over. And grandmother Emma always wore a good hat to go to the polling stations, for decorum, because it was a sacred thing to finally be able to vote too, like that husband and those children she had been able to save: more than going to church, with all due respect of the provost.
That of gender equality would have been another battle still to be fought and it started from the recognition of a factual truth: as Barbara Biscotti writes, «women did not“ contribute ”or“ participate ”in the Resistance, according to the usual expressions of a prevailing historical lexicon. Women “made” the Resistance ». Thank you, Grandma Emma.
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